There are investors who couldn't care less about dividends, and there are those who love them with an unbridled passion. Count Steve Weiss among the latter. The New York City public-relations rep first got a taste for dividends while working for publisher McGraw-Hill (now McGraw Hill Financial) in the late 1990s. Not only did the company pay a decent yield (topping 4 percent at the start of 1997, for example), it was a so-called 'Dividend Aristocrat' - one of those few companies that has raised its dividend every single year for at least the past 25 years.
But for diehard investors like Weiss, who loves the one-two portfolio punch of getting a yearly dividend raise and then reinvesting those dividends, there's a new product that could serve as catnip: ProShares' S&P 500 Aristocrats ETF (NOBL), comprised of equally-weighted portions of each aristocrat and a slim expense ratio of .35 percent. Investors have flung some $37 million at the fund since its October inception. The attraction: Since May 2005, when the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index began, it has boasted just under 10 percent in total annual returns, besting the broader S&P 500 by a little more than 3 percentage points a year.